Books

The Kerbal Player's Guide

Kerbal Space Program (KSP) is a critically acclaimed, bestselling space flight simulator game. It’s making waves everywhere from mainstream media to the actual space flight industry, but it has a bit of a learning curve. In this book, five KSP nerds—including an astrophysicist—teach you everything you need to know to get a nation of tiny green people into space.

KSP is incredibly realistic. When running your space program, you’ll have to consider delta-V budgets, orbital mechanics, Hohmann transfers, and more. This book is perfect for video game players, simulation game players, Minecrafters, and amateur astronomers.

Mobile Game Development with Unity

Written by Jon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison.Published by O'Reilly Media, late-2016.

Learn how to build games that work on several mobile devices, including phones and tablets powered by iOS and Android. This practical book shows you how to get started with the Unity game development ecosystem for creating beautiful, interactive 3D and 2D content.

You’ll get a top-to-bottom overview of Unity’s features—including its game engine, integrated development environment (IDE), and ready-made assets—with specific, project-oriented guidance on how to use those features in real games that will hook and delight players on any mobile platform.

Learning Swift

Get a thorough, hands-on exploration of Apple's Swift programming language. With this practical guide, you'll learn how to write Swift code and examine why this language works the way it does. You’ll build three complete apps, all tightly linked together: an iOS note-taking app, its OS X counterpart that uses iCloud to sync data, and an app for the Apple Watch that makes the user’s data available at a moment’s notice.

This book also explains how Swift works in the wider world, including how to use your apps with open-source frameworks, how to use extensions to help your app play nicely with other apps, and how to take the language beyond Apple’s domain with open-source Swift tools. Get started with Swift today and quickly learn how you can build on its foundations.

Swift Development for the Apple Watch

Take advantage of this unique opportunity to write for a brand new platform and get your apps noticed. This book is a short guide that introduces developers to building apps for the Apple Watch using Apple's newest language, Swift. It covers the WatchKit framework, glances, and notifications.

iOS Game Development Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Want to build games with iOS technologies? This cookbook provides detailed recipes for a wide range of common iOS game-development issues, ranging from 2D and 3D math to Game Center integration, and OpenGL to performance. If you’re familiar with iOS and Swift, this is the problem-solving guide you want.

This book targets Swift 1.2, but requires minimal changes for Swift 2.0 and iOS 9. Sample code and changelog is available for Swift 2.0 and iOS 9.

Swift Development with Cocoa, 1st Edition

Written by Jon Manning, Paris Buttfield-Addison, and Tim NugentPublished by O'Reilly Media, December 2014

This practical guide teaches programmers how to build applications for Mac OS X and iOS 8, using the Cocoa Framework, the new Xcode IDE, and Swift—Apple’s new programming language. You’ll quickly learn the basics for building Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps with Swift and Cocoa/CocoaTouch.

iOS Game Development Cookbook, 1st EditionOut of Print

Want to build games with iOS technologies? This cookbook provides detailed recipes for a wide range of common iOS game-development issues, ranging from 2D and 3D math to Game Center integration, and OpenGL to performance. If you’re familiar with iOS and Objective-C, this is the problem-solving guide you want.

This book covers Objective-C. It is still valid for using Objective-C with iOS 9 and Xcode 7.

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 4th Edition

Written by Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jonathon Manning, and Tim Nugent.Published by O'Reilly Media, March 2014.

For existing programmers to get up to speed on Cocoa and Objective-C, and start developing applications on the iOS 7+ and OS X 10.9+ platforms. From object-oriented programming to storing app data in iCloud, the fourth edition of this book covers everything you need to build apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 3rd Edition Out of Print

Written by Paris Buttfield-Addison and Jonathon Manning.Published by O'Reilly Media, December 2012.

Get up to speed on Cocoa and Objective-C, and start developing applications on the iOS and OS X platforms. If you don’t have experience with Apple’s developer tools, no problem! From object-oriented programming to storing app data in iCloud, this book covers everything you need to build apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.